Text is a prominent visual element of 2D design. Artists invest significant time in designing glyphs that are visually compatible with other elements in their shape and texture. In typography, a glyph is an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, intended to represent a readable character for the purposes of writing. A font may be comprised of a set of glyphs, each glyph corresponding to a particular symbol in an alphabet. For example, a font comprises a set of glyphs for each character in the alphabet. Each glyph has a specific shape and potential ornamentation and coloring. The glyphs comprising a font (shapes and coloring) distinguish one font from another.
However, this process is labor intensive and artists often design only the subset of glyphs that are necessary for a title or an annotation, which makes it difficult to alter the text after the design is created or to transfer an observed instance of a font to another project.
Early research on glyph synthesis focused on geometric modeling of outlines, which is limited to particular glyph topology (e.g., cannot be applied to decorative or hand-written glyphs) and cannot be used with image input. With the rise of deep neural networks, however, researchers have looked at modeling glyphs from images. These approaches have met with limited success. In particular, known approaches for glyph synthesis adopted approaches in which a single glyph is generated at a time. However, the quality of the generated glyphs using these types of approaches have exhibited limited quality and consistency of the generated glyphs across a font. In addition, some recent texture transfer techniques directly leverage glyph structure as a guiding channel to improve the placement of decorative elements. While this approach provides good results on clean glyphs it tends to fail on automatically-generated glyphs, as the artifacts of the synthesis procedure make it harder to obtain proper guidance from the glyph structure.
Thus, techniques are necessary for generating a full set of glyphs for a font from partial observations in which the generated glyphs are of high quality and internally consistent with respect to other glyphs in the font.